A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

A Techie's Guide to Improving Operations: Inspirations from Public Transit

There are lots of common challenges between technical operations and public transit operations. Public transit is a staple system in any city's infrastructure that helps to flourish the economy of the city. They have tried-and-tested runbook-type systems in place to deal with standard operations, and how to deal in times of incidents. Sounds pretty much like what technical operations teams have to deal with on a regular basis, right?

In this talk, we present some parallels between operating & running a public transit system that can be implemented at operations teams at software organizations. We will look at technical as well as simple organizational-behvaviour aspects that can be rolled out to increase operational efficiency at organizations, ultimately benefiting for global optimizations - such as minimize downtime, improve systems architecture & infrastructure.

Why is improving Ops important and often left out of agile enablement?

The world of infrastructure & operations is usually not looked at when enabling agile teams from a product management perspective. Most agile enablement process don't look at Ops early. All too often, we see the "throw over the wall, run it & figure it out" behaviour in organizations. The good news is... this behaviour is changing, slowly, but steadily, thanks to the DevOps movement.

There are lots of good literature out there on increasing operational excellence in technical organizations, however, in such a fast world, are leaders getting time to actually learn & reflect on tactics to enable themselves? Can there be easy takeaways that teams can implement starting tomorrow?

Yes they can!

By carefully seeing how a public transit system, such as the TTC, operates, there are lots of areas we can incrementally improve in Ops at our organizations.

Outline/structure of the Session

The talk will be presented as a series of observations (or concepts) that we have noticed and studied from city public transit systems, such as the TTC. Following each observation, we look at how the concept can be applied to technical operations, and share the experience in how we have successfully rolled out at our projects.

how that relates to software/technical operations (i.e., "what's the similar challenge we typically face in Ops?")

how someone would go about implementing the idea in their organization

some tips for success based on our experience in implementing it

10 minutes: a summary of key takeaways, closing remarks, followed by Q&A

To compliment the theme of the talk, the presentation slides will contain background images of real-world public transit systems, notices, etc. to help guide the conversation. The presentation slides themselves will be less text-heavy; we will only be highlighting key observations/concepts and emphasize on things to watch out for (providing a chance for the audience to take self-notes while listening to the presentation).

Learning Outcome

By the end of the presentation, the audience will gain some insight into common challenges that typical tech operations teams have and how such challenges can be improved via virtue of drawing parallels to how a public transit system deals with it.

In particular:

easy wins for Operations teams that one can implement without much resistance

how Operations team can help guide the "ship of success"

how to Operations teams can influence rest of the organization (i.e., make the organization empathize with the tough & hard job Operations teams have)

Target Audience

Anyone interested in Infrastructure & Operations

Prerequisite

Some knowledge of technical operations, such as infrastructure management, deployments, the pains of being on-call, etc., will be helpful.

However, it is not necessary, as this session is open to anyone interested in operations.

schedule 6 months ago

40 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

A face-to-face conversation is the most efficient and effective method of conveying information to and within a development team. So states the sixth principle of the Agile Manifesto.

Reality comes with a big "however." Work-at-home, outsourcing and inter-company partnerships mean that, more and more, we find ourselves n meetings where other participants are not in the same room. They may be around the corner or around the world. Some organizations invest in powerful tools to make this arrangement work well - or, sometimes, not so well. Others make do with audio only. Are we fooling ourselves when we call these events "meetings?" Maybe. Yet they're part of our world, so why not make the most of them?

In this lively session, you'll examine a proven pattern for facilitation, discover ways to overcome the challenges of virtual meetings and learn techniques that encourage meaningful participation. Most of these require more focus and ingenuity than expense.

Sue will share some of the techniques she learned as a teleworking pioneer in the '90s and a trainer of coaches, via distance, since 2003. Join us to explore ways you can bring your meetings with remote participants to life and respect everyone's time - including your own.

Ahmad Iqbal - Marketing needs Agility too. Here is how to get started...

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Beginner

If your organization is interesting in Agile transformation for technology, then you should also be looking into Agile Marketing.

Think of your organization like a car. Two wheels which represent Technology, and the other two wheels represent Marketing. Even if you get the Technology wheels spinning faster, unless the Marketing wheels can spin just as fast, your car will be going in circles. Product and marketing go hand in hand when it comes to deriving value from your respective markets.

As we all know, one of the major keys in Agile is the tightening of the feedback loop. This is why we want shorter sprint cycles, smaller batch sizes, and strive to continuously learn. When it comes to building products, it's the marketing team's job to test the market, size the market, segment the customers in the market, and just generally derive value from the market. But the problem is, most modern organizations are using waterfall-like operating models to run their marketing teams which hand-cuff talented marketers from surfacing new insights.

Marketing departments are still using waterfall processes because only up until a few years ago, digital marketing was a brand new concept. Large organizations used Print, TV and Radio advertising in their marketing campaigns, which by nature were not trackable. Campaigns were planned well in advance, usually at the start of a new financial year, and themes, content and messaging was approved then too. Because of the lack of trackability, marketing was always considered a cost-centre. Today that has changed.

Marketing is now quickly being understood as a revenue-driver. New tools are allowing us to track digital campaigns like never before imagined, everything and anything can be attributed to even the most minute detail. Because of this marketing focused companies are able to confidently say that for $(x) of marketing budget input, they are getting $(y) of revenue from customers. This is catapulting Marketing teams to the top of the business group food chain.

In this session we will discuss the need for Agile Marketing and why marketing should be the focal point for your organization's business agility transformation (hint: it's because marketer's own the customer journey). More importantly, this session will actually dive into the details of how a marketing team would implement Agile using the four stages of the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC).

Marketing needs lean and agile processes for many reasons, but here is a summary of the top four points we will cover in detail during the session:

1. Transparency: CMOs are feeling the pressure to prove their budgets.

2. Recyclability: How marketing backlogs are actually recyclable, giving you more bang for your transformation buck.

3. People Investment: Mimicking the skills of the "unicorn" growth hacker through a cross-functional team gives you Voltron.

4. Continuous Learning: Because today's digital marketing campaigns are so deeply trackable, the learning we can gather from these campaigns is unprecedented.

How does a marketing group get started with agile?

There is a four step marketing lifecycle that the audience will walk through with the presenter. It's called the Growth Marketing Lifecycle (GMLC) and it follows four steps:

1. Goal Orientation: This is where we visualize the marketing team's Funnel Map (similar to a Story Map used by IT teams).

2. Ideation: This is where we develop the backlog of "growth stories".

3. Execution & Deployment: Using the scrum methodology to sprint on work items.

4. Optimize: We look at growth stories that show signs of life, and double-triple down on them in future sprints.

This session was developed and will be delivered by Ahmad Iqbal, an Agile practitioner and coach. Ahmad has lead the development and marketing of over 4 technology products, and trained over 500 practitioners in Agile Software development and Agile Marketing. Ahmad has implemented this framework successfully at two major Canadian organizations, one major insurance company and one crown corporation.

NOTE: This presentation will have an interactive app provided to all participants which will allow them to follow the content on their mobile devices.

Daniel Doiron - OKALOA FLOW LAB

schedule 7 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Agility is a mindset. It is not a set of practices that can be installed. But how do you get out of the practices trap, especially when you have to mobilize not just software development and IT teams but the entire organization towards business agility where value is created through meaningful work? How do you engage business teams, users and customers? How do you enable higher levels of collaboration, not just within teams but also across teams? In other words, how do you get individuals, teams and even the entire organization into a flow state where everybody is doing the right thing at the right time by having the right conversations? Rational explanations and models of agility will only go so far. To be truly effective, the agile mindset needs to be experienced, which is exactly the purpose of the new and thought provoking Okaloa Flowlab simulation by Patrick Steyaert, one of agile's better scientific mind.

Through simulating a conventional work environment that reflects a mechanistic mindset characterized by a focus on resource efficiency, command and control and specialist workers, participants experience which roadblocks need to be overcome. As the team is taking its first baby steps into agile, they will experiment (in 2 or 3 rounds) with policies and practices (e.g. pull of work, cadences, limiting WIP) that enable collaboration, get the team into flow, and allow an agile mindset to emerge. Weaved into the simulations they will discover the fundamental difference between resource efficiency and flow efficiency.

Participants will step into the simulator after a brief explanation of the rules.

Fawzy Manaa - How to Lose Dev and Alienate Ops

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

As many organizations have adopted agile development and are starting to undertake a DevOps transformation to complete the lifecycle, it is not always easy to keep traditionally alienated back office practitioners engaged. In fact, many organizations go about engaging developers, testers, operators, ... in a way that does not align with the spirit of DevOps. Many enterprise DevOps transformations fail because of this very reason, this session will inform the audience of what it takes to create a strong and sustainable movement within an IT organization in today's world where people who perform different functions that are seemingly at odds can come together in the spirit of improving how work is done and delivered.

The speaker will approach the topic from an anti-patterns perspective, highlighting the symptoms of transformation failure from structural, procedural, and strategic angles and discussing alternative approaches to enable DevOps transformation success.

Johanne Boyd / Carlo Rosales - Why can't the business be agile too? How ADP is incorporating business Agile practices to keep up with technology

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

Does your business struggle to catch up and understand the technical deliverables from your Sprint Reviews? Is there unnecessary re-work and scope creep because requirements are not properly described by the business? ADP has sought to address these issues by incorporating business Agile practices to keep up with technology. The result? Clearer requirements, strong engagement during Sprint Reviews and a collaborative solution with business readiness aligning with technical deliverables. Join our session to find out more!!

Mishkin Berteig / David Sabine - JIRA is the Worst Possible Choice

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

A rant, with evidence, on why electronic tools in general, and JIRA in particular, are anti-Agile. Participants will use the Agile Manifesto to evaluate the electronic tools they are currently familiar with. JIRA is used as a case study.

NOTE: Scrum asks us to have courage. The Agile Manifesto asks us to value individuals and interactions over processes and tools. I hope the organizing committee will consider this proposal despite the risk that it might offend some tool vendors. If we can't speak freely about our experiences with tools, we will fail as a community.

schedule 7 months ago

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40 Mins

Talk

Beginner

We all know how people use design thinking to create better products and deliver delightful experiences to our users. However, design thinking can be an excellent tool to use for organizational change. In the case of organizational change, our product is the change that we are trying to drive, and our customers are those people who are impacted (internally and externally) and have to live with that change. In the same way that design thinking puts the user front-and-centre for products, it can be used to put people in the organization front-and-centre. In this talk we will discuss how design thinking works and, as a case study, how we have applied it at Scotiabank to help drive adoption of the Bank’s NPS customer insights into building solutions that serve our customers. In that program, previous internal processes were ineffective in pushing relevant data to delivery teams at the right time. Using a Lean or Agile approach would have provided some benefit, but taking a design thinking approach uncovered an array of useful insights to make the whole process more purposeful. Learn from this example to explore how you might incorporate design thinking to drive greater effectiveness and relevance for your team’s body of work.

schedule 8 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Intermediate

Data, the way that we process it and store it, is one of many important aspects of IT. Data is the lifeblood of our organizations, supporting real-time business processes and decision-making. For our DevOps strategy to be truly effective we must be able to safely and quickly evolve production databases, just as we safely and quickly evolve production code. Yet for many organizations their data sources prove to be less than trustworthy and their data-oriented development efforts little more than productivity sinkholes. We can, and must, do better.

If database evolution isn’t an explicit part of your DevOps strategy then you’re not really doing DevOps yet, are you?

thomasjeffrey - Scaling Agile without the scaling framework

schedule 6 months ago

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60 Mins

Talk

Advanced

Increasingly Agile adoption has focused on how to operate larger enterprises with agility, and run larger and larger initiatives, at scale.

In many cases, organizations have turned to explicit agile scaling frameworks to address their needs to coordinate increasingly larger efforts to deliver value in a way of that does not sacrifice feedback and self organization . Often these frameworks attempt to address the complexity that comes with large scale by adding extra process and procedure. Prescriptive advice is prescribed in the form of additional roles, stages, gates, and methods. This approach to scaling bears more than a little similarity to the heavy weight methods of the past, but in this case merging agile terminology with much of the same framework bloat and bureaucracy we have seen in the past.

As a a result adoptees struggle to understand how to fit these frameworks to their context, and seasoned coaches struggle to wrestle out the good bits.

During this session I will discuss a different approach to scaling agile, one that places an emphasis on both mindset and practice. I'll pay particular attention to the topic of leadership, organizational design, and the role management has to play in designing a system of work that allows larger efforts to work with an agile mindset without being forced into a one size fits all process framework.

A key part of the discussion will be to showcase how core agile methods and techniques can be extended and expanded to successfully manage coordinated agile deployments that range from hundreds to thousands of FTEs. I'll present these techniques by using real examples of agile deployments I have been a part of during my work with ScotiaBank's agile journey.

Key Scaling Practices covered will include:- The design components required to structure your organization based on demand- How to continuously de-scale your organization- "Get Out Of the Boardroom" style governance and leadership- Operational cadences and Impediment Escalation Flow- Managing the flow of value at the Business Technology Asset level - Moving the conversation from stories to domains- Streamlining finance and budgeting to align to the agile mindset

I hope to illustrate ways that both management and knowledge workers can select techniques that allow them to scale agile as needed to support ever larger initiatives without succumbing to a one size fits all framework that does not adapt constant change.

Taimur Mohammad - Delighting the Customer at the First Point of Interaction

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

The first interaction with a prospective customer often makes or breaks the sale. In today’s age of instantly obtaining products and application at the touch of a button (e.g. mobile apps), the last thing that customers expect is a long, complicated process. Truly delighting the customer requires moving towards instant gratification. How do you re-organize traditionally separate business and technology groups so that the focus is on delighting the customer?

A group within a leading financial institution identified this as a goal and looked at lean-agile principles and practices to rapidly iterate on delighting the customer and bringing business & technology processes seamlessly together. While delivery was set up using what we’ve come to as good lean-agile principles and practices, how the product backlog was managed provided the rapid feedback, innovation and pivot/pursuits required to truly delight the customers.

In building the product backlog a number of practices were introduced to make it dynamic and ever evolving.

Kanban connected the customer to the product backlog which connected to the delivery engine

Product metrics and cost of delay were used to create hypotheses to prioritize MVPs

Rapid feedback through various customer and proxy customer interactions were leveraged to feed the customer backlog

Monthly releases ensured a constant flow of new features to enhance the customer’s experience

Story decomposition ensured the customers feedback was being directly communicated with the delivery team

The result? While the client is still on its journey the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Key metrics indicate greater customer satisfactions, increased speed to completion and simplified internal processes.

In this talk we’ll discuss how we’ve taken various product management related practices and stitched them together to connect the customer to the delivery engine. We’ll provide practical examples that we’ve seen work in our experience and engage in a discussion with the group to connect their questions to our examples.

schedule 6 months ago

90 Mins

Workshop

Beginner

Last year, I was at an Agility Day in New Jersey for my company (ADP). During this day of fun, we uncovered and created new ways of improving retrospectives and new retrospective activities.

You don't have to always do "Start, Stop, Continue" or "Pluses and Deltas". There are plenty of activities that are more creative and more joyful for teams and groups!

In this workshop, we will follow a powerful technique to brainstorm ideas, filter down to the best ones, and then try them out on each other to uncover new and more effective retrospective activities. Come prepared to contribute to a new group of retrospectives!

We will go through a divergent process, and emergent process, and a convergent process in creating our new retrospective techniques. These and other powerful techniques will be utilized from the book Gamestorming to harness the power of the participants to create powerful and useful retrospective activities.

schedule 6 months ago

Sold Out!

40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Lean-Agile is easily & often associated with customer centric products and solution. The “customer facing” nature of the product allows for thin slicing, feedback and iteration which in turn leads to greater business agility and customer satisfaction. While there have been many exceptional case studies that demonstrate this, applying lean-agile to non-customer facing solutions has often been dismissed. Why is this? The risk is too high to thin slice? There’s no way to get customer feedback? There’s no way to deliver using iterative approaches?

Over the last 16 months a group within a leading financial services client was brought to a cross roads. Their traditionally stable market was on the verge of being disrupted due to emerging innovation and competition from smaller, more nimble competitors. They knew to operate the same way would result in significant losses in market share over the next decade. To survive, they had to lead the innovation. Change was becoming the norm, and their focus shifted from being solely focused on final solutions, to also re-thinking how they got to these solutions.

Enter lean & agile principles and practices. Initially dismissed because this client’s business model operated as the backbone of the institution. Much of the work they did was in facilitating payment origination and transaction settlement systems. Applying lean & agile required some significant tailoring.

In this talk we will discuss this client’s journey, how they changed the entire culture within the organization to focus on survival through agility. We’ll discuss how common lean-agile principles and practices can be applied and tailored to support transforming legacy eco-systems with back-end facing solutions where the concept of a real life "customer" is quite foreign. We'll visit our experiences in encouraging the transparency that is synonymous with an agile approach and how that fostered better partnerships and trust across many groups. We’ll explore how a culture of learning has established early wins for the client and set them on a path towards leading innovation, agility and empowered being first to market.

Tyler Motherwell - Divide And Conquer

schedule 6 months ago

Sold Out!

40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Conway’s Law tells us that the products an organization produces will mirror the communication structures within themselves. Many organizations struggle to organize in a way that facilitates both agility and bringing quality products to market. However, this is a problem that exists, not just within IT, but across the entire enterprise. Imagine you’re the (somewhat mythical/revered) business. How do you organize yourselves in this brave new world? Many of the common patterns (systems, application/application layer) that we commonly apply in technology aren’t good fits.

In this session, you will learn how to use a structured method to organize your most important resource (your people) around your most important goals. Additionally, you will learn about team types outside of your typical cross-functional team! We will use an actual industry case study to help illustrate usage, as well as give inspiration to how you might do the same in your organization

Raj Mudhar - Changing culture--A primer for leaders

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Advanced

Ever notice how you feel when you enter a company's doors? Is there excitement in the air? A buzz? Does it feel like innovation is oozing from the walls? Or does it feel as exciting as a tax man's trousers? What makes you feel these things? And how can you start creating a better cultural experience for your employees and customers?

Culture is hard to change. And every time I hear there is a "mindset problem" or, "we need to change our culture", it becomes painfully clear that focusing on process and tooling changes alone won't cut it. Thankfully, there are effective techniques to help you hack your culture.

In this workshop, you will learn how to identify the attributes of your existing culture. You will build a culture map, starting with the visible signs of culture and then delve into norms, values, and finally, the core of culture--the underlying assumptions we don't even think about. Understanding where you are, culturally, is the first step.

From there, you will run through facilitated activities to build a culture hack. Simply put, a hack allows you to test a culture change and if it works, you can stabilize that change and start adding new hacks. Each hack moves you down that all important path to a new, vibrant culture, step by step.

My team has been experimenting with these techniques with several organizations. You'll hear about some real-world hacks and how they helped organizations improve. Our approach is not built on a single culture framework or a change management system. It is built on the work of many; the Cynefin framework, complex adaptive systems thinking, lean change, supported by culture walks, interviewing, and impact mapping to name a few of the tools you'll learn to use.

As a leader in your organization, one of your most important roles is as the steward and curator of your culture. This workshop will help you make culture change real, practical, and measurable. With these tools, you can have a positive impact on your people and customers.

Here are some common cultural challenges:

Excessive command and control

A belief that employees need detailed processes because they are incapable of making decisions on their own

Fear of making a mistake

Long and excessive approval processes - again, because employees cannot make good decisions

No or little focus on customers

Value statements like "We value our people" but with no supporting evidence

Sam Tabbara - How to transform culture in large enterprises

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

Most important factors in any Agile transformation are the ability to react and change quickly, which are most often associated with startups than large enterprises. To really win and transform an organization there are core elements that need to be mastered and executed at the culture level. We will cover these elements and provide you real use cases where transformations both succeeded and failed to meet their potential to prove the relationship.

Louise Heldoorn - How Kanban Propelled our DevOps Team to New Heights

schedule 6 months ago

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40 Mins

Experience Report

Beginner

Description/Summary Development Operations is a team that has requests from many sources, many of which have conflicting priorities.How do we move from being reactive, switching priorities, getting buried with stress of delivering on time with high quality to being proactive, innovative highly productive.

In this session I will walk through the journey my team took to move from reactively treading water to becoming an extremely innovative highly efficient development operations team.

schedule 6 months ago

Sold Out!

40 Mins

Experience Report

Intermediate

The number of agile teams that I support went from 20 (too many) to more than 70 (absurd) in a few months. What could I do? How could I help them?

From this need came the Agile Coach Program that Paul created and facilitated at ADP with a small group of individuals - one was Iaroslav Torbin. These participants already support (or wanted to support) teams (be they using Scrum or Kanban) and the individuals around them. This is the story of that journey and the results.

Feedback from the program:

"The agile coach program has been a valuable experience both personally and professionally. It was a fun, interactive and engaging."

"I really enjoyed being a part of this program. With its interactive and constructive parts."

schedule 6 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Agile failure is most felt by Scrum Masters. Why do so many fail to properly support their teams? Why do so many fail to inspire meaningful change in the level of leadership? Why do so many fail to guide transformation in their organisations?

In this workshop, we will harness the knowledge and experience of the participants!

Why?Because everyone can contribute to the learning of the entire group. It will dynamic, full or energy, and joyful - woohoo!

Who can benefit the most from the session and the power of harnessing the group?

Scrum Masters that are struggling to do this role well

Leaders that are not seeing the results needed for an effective Scrum team through a weak/unskilled Scrum Master

Agile coaches that are coaching Scrum Masters without meaningful or consistent results

Project managers trying to make the transition to becoming a successful Scrum Master

This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer"

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

Many people are taking on the mantle of Scrum Masters across agile teams around the world. Unfortunately, many of them have come from more traditional work structures that don't develop effective Scrum Masters. There is a misconception about the purpose of a Scrum Master. Often the Scrum Master becomes the facilitator or the project manager. This has to stop. Effective leaders, agile coaches, and Scrum Masters take advantage of vital behaviours in supporting scrum masters or by building mastery within these behaviours.

During this workshop, participants will go through a series of exercises to identify the purpose of a Scrum Master, how we can measure success, identify potential vital behaviours, learn from others to determine the vital behaviours, and then create a sound influence strategy to enable effective Scrum Masters and the work that they do. This workshop will use concepts and the model from the book "Influencer" (by Joseph Grenny et all) which details the three (3) keys to a successful change initiative and uses the six (6) sources of influence.

Prepare to work together to co-discover the Scrum Master vital behaviours!

schedule 7 months ago

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90 Mins

Workshop

Intermediate

Mob programming is collaboration taken to the extreme, eliciting the best from every member of the team. In this session, you will experience the dynamics of mob programming and learn how to use this technique successfully in your own environments.

After mobbing with well over thirty teams, we've seen definite patterns emerge, that we'll discuss here.